French Physicists Want to Use Giant Lasers to Make it Rain (Video)

We humanfolk have a water problem. More and more of the places we live have less and less of it. Damn ye, climate change, for raising sea levels and flooding entire nations' stores of freshwater with saline. This summer, Texas was drained of water to the last drop, a giant scorched prune. And so, some French physicists are riding to the rescue -- by using a giant laser designed to create condensation in otherwise arid environments.

Think of this as geo-engineering-lite. If it doesn't work, or if it turns out to have severe unintended consequences, we turn the laser off. In this sense, it's crucially different than other, more irreversible geo-engineering strategies like mass ocean fertilization, cloud-whiteneing, or dispersing sulfuric aerosols in the atmosphere.

As such, there's every reason to take this project seriously, as whimsical as it may seem.